Optimising the Customer Experience: Conversion Rate Optimisation Part 3

Con­tent Velocity

A bit of your mar­ket­ing invest­ment goes to waste every time a user bounces from your website—which means an opti­mised cus­tomer expe­ri­ence on your web­site is cru­cial to keep­ing users engaged with your brand, and max­imis­ing your mar­ket­ing ROI.

In this series of arti­cles, I’ve been giv­ing my per­spec­tives on how focus­ing on con­ver­sion rate opti­mi­sa­tion can help you to deliv­er the best pos­si­ble expe­ri­ence to your cus­tomers. In the first arti­cle of the series, I exam­ined cre­ative con­sis­ten­cy between adver­tis­ing cre­ative and the onsite expe­ri­ence. In the sec­ond, I explored how to use mul­ti­vari­ate test­ing and A/B test­ing to gen­er­ate “recipes” for pre­sent­ing each on-site offer to each cus­tomer segment.

Once you’ve got your cre­ative con­cepts and page recipes, you’re ready to start pop­u­lat­ing fresh con­tent to those pages—but this can be a slow, tedious process if you’re not man­ag­ing it from a sin­gle cen­tralised source. On the oth­er hand, when it’s easy to build con­tent and push it out to each ver­sion of each land­ing page, that fresh con­tent becomes a pow­er­ful tool for fuel­ing con­ver­sion rate optimisation.

That ease of con­tent cre­ation and deploy­ment is what we mean when we talk about con­tent velocity.

Sur­fac­ing assets

Your mar­ket­ing team prob­a­bly has all the assets it needs to gen­er­ate fresh con­tent for your sites and apps on a week­ly or even dai­ly basis. The prob­lem is that your team—like many others—is prob­a­bly a bit murky on which con­tent and assets are avail­able, and on the process by which those assets get to your site through your in-house con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem (CMS).

That’s the prob­lem the Adobe Assets core ser­vice tar­gets. This ser­vice enables your mar­ket­ing teams to find and sur­face cre­ative assets quick­ly in the Adobe Mar­ket­ing Cloud, and use them across Adobe Mar­ket­ing Cloud solu­tions. It also enables teams who devel­op cre­ative assets to active­ly share those assets among dif­fer­ent groups with­in your organ­i­sa­tion. This means you’ll always have a cen­tral place from which to push out content—and a cen­tral loca­tion to access when you’re in need of fresh creative.

For exam­ple, Adobe solu­tions recent­ly helped Shell, one of the world’s fore­most petro­chem­i­cal com­pa­nies, to reach their tar­get audi­ences more effec­tive­ly. Shell oper­ates in more than 70 coun­tries and ter­ri­to­ries, serv­ing direct and busi­ness-to-busi­ness cus­tomers. The com­pa­ny now uses Adobe soft­ware to main­tain seam­less inte­gra­tion between its cre­ative, pub­lish­ing, and mar­ket­ing busi­ness units—combining the work­flows of their cre­ative and dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing depart­ments to make sure every team in the busi­ness uses the most rel­e­vant and con­sis­tent ver­sions of their content.

Set­ting up versions

Once your cre­ative teams have pro­duced new con­tent, and you’ve got a sin­gle seam­less work­flow between design­ers and marketers—thanks to inte­gra­tion between Adobe Cre­ative Cloud and Adobe Mar­ket­ing Cloud—it becomes much eas­i­er to set up vari­a­tions of each land­ing page on your site.

This process becomes even more intu­itive with the help of the Visu­al Expe­ri­ence Com­pos­er built into Adobe Tar­get. With this pow­er­ful tool, a mar­keter with no pre­vi­ous web design expe­ri­ence can quick­ly view dif­fer­ent ver­sions of a page, swap out images and pieces of text, and pull in new assets from the assets library—all right from inside a web brows­er. To see how easy this is, check out the live demo avail­able on the Adobe Tar­get web­site.

The effec­tive­ness of testing

Visu­al Expe­ri­ence Com­pos­er pro­vides a quick way to test dif­fer­ent page recipes in dif­fer­ent places, and to man­u­al­ly tweak cer­tain recipes as new cus­tomer data comes in. But what if you had a sys­tem that could lever­age cus­tomer data to work out which recipe would be most effec­tive for each cus­tomer seg­ment, auto­mat­i­cal­ly and progressively?

That’s exact­ly what Adobe Target’s built-in auto-allo­ca­tion does. Instead of hav­ing to run an A/B or mul­ti­vari­ate test for a week, as you nor­mal­ly would, auto-allo­cate works out which vari­a­tion of each piece of con­tent will be most effec­tive for each cus­tomer seg­ment or pro­file, and auto­mat­i­cal­ly swaps it in.

This com­plete­ly elim­i­nates the stan­dard learn­ing peri­od. The sys­tem sim­ply lever­ages your in-house cus­tomer data to work out which page will be most impact­ful for each vis­i­tor, then serves that ver­sion of the page to the indi­vid­ual, instantly.

One of the most obvious—but also most effective—uses of this capa­bil­i­ty comes when you let your users tell you when con­tent becomes rel­e­vant based on their inter­ac­tion. This saves mar­keters count­less hours and resources required to man­u­al­ly mon­i­tor tests and deter­mine the best course of action. For exam­ple, an online retail­er may use auto-allo­cate to deter­mine that a celebri­ty video tout­ing the new line of t‑shirts is dri­ving the most pur­chas­es. The video will auto­mat­i­cal­ly be pushed to more online vis­i­tors, while at the same time the retail­er con­tin­ues to test the per­for­mance of oth­er con­tent like newslet­ters or banners.

In short, con­tent veloc­i­ty is the abil­i­ty to react in real time—or as close to real time as possible—to adapt to the chang­ing needs of your cus­tomers, by pro­vid­ing con­tent that sup­ports their inter­ac­tions with your brand. When your tools help you pub­lish that con­tent as effi­cient­ly as pos­si­ble, man­age and test that con­tent in order to learn which cre­atives work best, and lever­age data sci­ence and algo­rithms get the right con­tent to the right peo­ple, you’re able to focus and deliv­er the best pos­si­ble cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, and max­imise your mar­ket­ing ROI.

The three ele­ments that I’ve dis­cussed in this series of articles—creative con­sis­ten­cy, mul­ti­vari­ate and A/B test­ing, and con­tent velocity—are all equal­ly impor­tant for an effec­tive mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy. They don’t have to be addressed in the order I dis­cussed them; in fact, as you drill down on any one of them, you’ll prob­a­bly find your­self mak­ing adjust­ments in the oth­er two. That’s why it’s help­ful to have an inte­grat­ed set of tools that enable you to go from cre­ative con­cept on the desk­top of your design­er, all the way through to exe­cu­tion of the con­cept and mea­sure­ment of its impact through the Adobe Mar­ket­ing Cloud.